PERLMANN'S SILENCE by PASCAL MERCIER

Graham Reid | Mar 25, 2012 | 2 min read

Those who are nervous about speaking in
public usually have the perfect way out, they simply don't do it.
And, for most, the required occasions are mercifully few so the
paralysing fear never has to be addressed.

But what of those for whom being in the
public eye is what they do? What if they are struck with an anxiety
attack or stage fright? The more they consider it, the worse the
condition becomes. The fear of being “found out”, of failure in
the pubic domain, of letting their public, colleagues and themselves
down.

When, in 1995, an attack of depression
coupled with bipolar disorder hit the polymath Stephen Fry – a man
who always seemed to exude supreme self-confidence – he quit the
London season of the play he was in and fled Britain.

Such extreme actions may seem bizarre,
but when they strike the otherwise confident person, the internal
monologue becomes filled with choking self-doubt and often irrational
thought.

Such a situation hits respected
linguist and recently widowed Philipp Perlmann in this intense
psychological thriller by the author of the engrossing Night Train
to Lisbon.

Invited to a conference near Genoa,
Perlmann slowly realises he cannot write his speech and, through
procrastination, imagining the embarrassing scenario which will
unfold if he doesn't deliver, and relying on barbiturates which make
him woozy, he sinks deeper and deeper into emotional turmoil.

The jovial nature of his assured
colleagues becomes claustrophobic and as the days laboriously tick
down to his seminar, he enters a phase of manic confusion. The
arbitrary deadlines he places on himself invariably slip past: “When
I pass this spot again on the way back I'll know what I'm going to
do.”

Admitting failure becomes
unconscionable but his solution is even worse. While translating a
paper by a colleague Leskov who cannot attend he decides he will use
that.

“The word PLAGIARISM formed within
him; against his will it grew bigger and bigger, it spread within him
and filled him with an internal roar. He had never been confronted
with the word as he was now, he discovered it properly for the first
time.”

But when the absent Leskov – “in St
Petersburg, thousands of miles away, without an exit permit and still
tied to his sick mother” – announces he will attend, Perlmann
spirals into an even darker turn of self-preservation.

He develops a hatred for the man, the
Italian coastline with all those twisting turns and precipitous
cliffs, but . . .?

“Witnesses. Of course there must be
no witnesses.”The road might be too busy, perhaps the mountain
road then? And so Perlmann's inner monologue takes hold with a
Hitchcock-like tension where small twists of fate, a passing comment
by a colleague and a further angle of concern send him into a new
downward spin of rationalisation and plotting.

At 600 pages and with Perlmann's inner
doubts recounted in forensic detail, his doubts turned through his
inner prism for scrutiny, this is a long and demanding novel. Here –
as in certain Hitchcock films – little of consequence happens in
the exterior world.

Mercier – the pseudonym for Peter
Bieri, a Swiss professor of philosophy in Berlin – writes of those
crippling self-doubts with a dogged determination to unravel them.
But it makes for an equally dogged read of glacially-paced narrative
about an unsympathetic character over-thinking his increasingly
fragile ego.

Hitchcock would have chopped this right
back but lost none of the essence as Cary Grant sweated inside a
beautifully cut Brooks Brothers suit in this picturesque setting.

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